Research Methods books

Traditional research discourses continue to present academic work as rational, detached, objective and free from emotion. This volume argues that the presentation of research as ‘objective’ conceals the subject positions of researchers, and the emotional imperatives that often drive research. The collection engages with the emotional experiences of researchers working in different traditions, contexts and sites, and demonstrates their centrality in data production, analysis, dissemination and ethical practice.   This edited volume offers contributions from a range of well-established and early career scholars who argue for an emotional rebellion in the academic world. The authors reflect on their own experiences of research, generously sharing their approach to their craft, and the uncertainties, concerns, enjoyments, and questions it entails. The contributors are based in a range of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences and STEM, and in the museum sector. This provides a unique opportunity for reflection on differences between and similarities across disciplinary boundaries, shedding new light on common problems and opportunities stimulated by emotion in research.  The collection demonstrates how emotion can be valuable and meaningful in the activities of research, reflection and dissemination: offering authenticity to the academic voice, bringing clarity to interpretive biases, producing engaging outputs which connect with diverse readerships, and potentially reshaping disciplinary foundations and relations. Emotion and the Researcher: Sites, Subjectivities and Relationships will be an invaluable companion for researchers, postgraduate students and other academics with an interest in the emotional elements of conflict, negotiation, relationality and reflexivity, within and beyond the research encounter.

Over the past decade there has been growing national and international concern about the impact of systems for the management of research ethics in the social sciences. In particular these ‘procedural bureaucracies’ are seen as inappropriate to the ethical governance of social scientific research as they were designed around the challenges presented by biomedical research.This volume addresses and debates these concerns and identifies areas of ‘common ground’, core ethics principles and areas of particular concern in research ethics across the social sciences. This volume draws on proceedings and papers delivered at a Symposia series under the auspices of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS). This project aimed to advance the understanding and application of core ethics values to all aspects of social science research from inception and review through research design, data acquisition, analysis and management to dissemination and application, in collaboration with social science learned societies, research funders, higher education establishments, researchers and participants in research.

In the global research community, English has become the main language of scholarly publishing in many disciplines. At the same time, online machine translation systems have become increasingly easy to access and use. Is this a researcher’s match made in heaven, or the road to publication perdition?  Here Lynne Bowker and Jairo Buitrago Ciro introduce the concept of machine translation literacy, a new kind of literacy for scholars and librarians in the digital age. For scholars, they explain how machine translation works, how it is (or could be) used for scholarly communication, and how both native and non-native English-speakers can write in a translation-friendly way in order to harness its potential. Native English speakers can continue to write in English, but expand the global reach of their research by making it easier for their peers around the world to access and understand their works, while non-native English speakers can write in their mother tongues, but leverage machine translation technology to help them produce draft publications in English. For academic librarians, the authors provide a framework for supporting researchers in all disciplines as they grapple with producing translation-friendly texts and using machine translation for scholarly communication—a form of support that will only become more important as campuses become increasingly international and as universities continue to strive to excel on the global stage.  Machine Translation and Global Research is a must-read for scientists, researchers, students, and librarians eager to maximize the global reach and impact of any form of scholarly work.

The eleven chapters in this volume of Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance discuss a variety of issues of methodological significance in research in the fields of criminology and criminal justice studies. As scholarly work on various aspects of crime, deviance, criminal justice, and social control has progressed tremendously in recent decades, both in terms of scope as well as with respect to theoretical approaches, the employed methods of investigation have also broadened and advanced to be as sophisticated as those used in any other area of contemporary social-science inquiry. The authors in this volume demonstrate the methodological maturity and diversity of current empirical research in criminology and criminal justice in a number of areas, such as general trends of crime, criminal networks, violence against women, sex work, elder financial exploitation, school safety, immigrant detention, extremism on the internet, and human trafficking.  Presenting a state-of-the-art overview of criminological and criminal justice methodologies today, this book is of interest to a wide range of scholars and students in the fields of criminology, sociology, justice policy, and criminal justice.

This book explores recent developments in Institutional Ethnography (IE) and offers reflective accounts on how IE is being utilised and understood in social research. IE is a sociological sub-discipline developed by Dorothy E. Smith that seeks to explicate the textual mediation of people’s everyday experiences in their local sites of being. As an approach, IE is growing in significance across the globe, particularly in Canada, USA, Australia and UK.   This collection includes contributions from those involved in the early development of IE alongside Smith as well as early career researchers, new to the sociology, theory and method of IE. Chapters focus on IE as a sociological theory and qualitative research method; the relationship between data generation and analysis in IE; implications from its findings for policy; and IE as a significant methodological approach. This involves explication of the theoretical, the operationalization of IE, and links between the theoretical and the empirical. It illuminates the relationship between data generation and analysis and includes consideration of its own textual relations of ruling.

This volume focuses on the ethics of internet and social networking research exploring the challenges faced by researchers making use of social media and big data in their research. The internet, the world wide web and social media – indeed all forms of online communications – are attractive fields of research across a range of disciplines. They offer opportunities for methodological initiatives and innovations in research and easily accessed, massive amounts of primary and secondary data sources. This collection examines the new challenges posed by data generated online, explores how researchers are addressing those ethical challenges, and provides rich case studies of ethical decision making in the digital age.

The Lost Ethnographies reports on the methodological lessons learnt from ethnographic projects that, viewed superficially, failed. Experienced researchers write about projects they planned, and were excited about, which then never began, had to be abandoned, or took such unexpected directions that it became a different piece of work altogether. The topics and settings are varied and disparate, but the lessons learnt have important similarities. This collection focuses on absences; topics and settings that remain under researched; taken for granted aspects of social life that have not been scrutinized, and finally the potential insights that are gained when absences are carefully examined and explored. Readers will learn a great deal about research design, fundraising, writing up, access negotiations, serendipity in the field, and the complex interaction between the body and the brain of the ethnographer and the realities of ethnographic research. Maximising learning from the ‘failings’ of ourselves and of others is the positive message of the collection. The most poignant chapters are those in which the author ‘returns’ to reread and reflect on a past project; something that is not done often enough, partly because it can be painful. The accounts of projects which had to be abandoned or radically changed offer hope to researchers facing difficulties in their own investigations. These reflections, on projects that were never even begun, show how to gain fresh energy and social science insight from apparent rejection, and the collection approaches the whole concept of lost ethnography in provocative ways.

This collection focuses on virtue theory and the ethics of social science research. A moral philosophy that has been relatively neglected in the domain of research ethics, virtue ethics has much to offer those who wish to go beyond the difficulties generated by the biomedical model of research ethics and positively engage with the ethics of social scientific research. As the chapters contained in this volume show, the perspective provided by virtue ethics also exhibits a certain affinity with the emerging discourse regarding research integrity. Contributors develop various facets of virtue ethics in order to illuminate a range of issues in the practice and governance of social science, including integrity, the ethics of ethical review, ethics education, and the notion of phrónÄ“sis (wisdom).